The release of a 2010 internal memo by Steve Jobs that went viral this week reveals the Jobs worth learning about. A futurist but a pragmatic one, with green-eyeshade attention to costs. A keen, often admiring, observer of the competition. A leader gifted with seeing around corners, anticipating rivals’ next moves. And especially a leader wary of sticking with the tried and true.

Scroll down to read the memo

The memo is at odds with the caricature of Jobs, the frenzied, self-important, and overconfident bully of some 30 years’ depiction before his untimely death in 2011. This is the Jobs who really did, as he vowed to, “punch a dent in the universe,” with a remarkable run of must-have products and services including the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad.

Most important, though, is that the Jobs revealed here — not for the first time, to be sure — is a sworn enemy of complacency. Jobs’ memo describes a company busy reinventing itself.

Complacency is the leading cause of death, and brushes with death, among once-great enterprises. Examples include T. Eaton Co., Xerox Corp., General Motors Co. and Nortel Networks Corp. Their crippling came of a failure to constantly improve.

It’s most unusual to get an inside look at what makes an important firm like Apple tick. The 2010 memo was written by Jobs in point form, and set the agenda for an annual summit of Apple’s 100 top executives. It was brought to light by attorneys for Apple competitor Samsung Electronics Co. in the South Korean company’s patent dispute with California-based Apple.

Apple has long been thought to ignore rivals. Yet here, Jobs returns time and again to the competition, whose advances, in progress or on the horizon, trouble him.

So Jobs declares 2011 to be the year of a “Holy War” with a Google that is outpacing Apple in cloud computing (in which the search giant is “way ahead of Apple”), and music, apps and Internet services including email and calendars. “We have to catch up to Google cloud services and leapfrog them,” he writes. (Sure enough, 2011 saw the launch of Apple’s game-changing iCloud.) The first iPad was still making its market debut, and here’s Jobs writing that we have to “ship iPad 2 with amazing hardware and software before our competitors even catch up with our current model.”

To outsiders, Apple seemed insistent on premium pricing for its goods, counting on the Apple cache to drive sales. In his 2010 memo, though, Jobs has a grip on how that strategy of maintaining lavish profit margins may be biting Apple in the behind. We have to “create low-cost iPhone model based on iPod touch to replace 3GS,” Jobs writes, a departure from high-margin goods once inconceivable for Jobs.

Apple was founded on the personal computer, of course, which at the time of Jobs’ memo still accounted for one-third of total revenues. But “Apple is in danger of hanging on to old paradigm too long (innovator’s dilemma),” Jobs writes of PCs.

The innovator’s dilemma is a widespread quandary in business. It refers to companies that cannot shed a founding businesses that has long been lucrative, but is now flirting with obsolescence. Yet that waning business is the only one that is comfortable to a corporate bureaucracy grown sclerotic, and routinely sabotages new ventures.

And that founding business, with its sentimental hold on high-ranking executives who launched their careers there, is still throwing off a ton of cash. It will continue to do so, until its sudden obliteration by a rival technology takes down the entire firm. That has been the fate of a recently bankrupt Eastman Kodak Co., whose reliance on reliably profitable traditional film kept it from adapting to the new era of digital photography.

For all the attachment Jobs felt for PCs, the first of which he had a hand in designing in his 20s, Apple now lives in the “post-PC era,” Jobs notes. The “iPad [tablet] outsold Mac within six months” of the iPad’s launch.

In the corporate world of short-term profit maximization, it is refreshing to see the importance Jobs attaches to, say, the specifications for the iPhone 5. That device was still two years away from launch, an eon in fast-paced tech, which prompted this apt reaction this week to Jobs’ memo by tech writer Brian X. Chen of the New York Times: “While some consumers eagerly anticipate an iPhone 6, which is rumoured to be released this year, Apple is probably already busy tinkering with an iPhone 7.”

Just so. Most products marketed by well-run firms are obsolete when they first hit the market. The second generation of the product is on the threshold of being released. And prototypes of the third and fourth are under development.

There’s a reason BlackBerry Ltd.’s share of the U.S. market for smartphone operating systems has plunged to a current 3 per cent or so, as of March, compared with 42 per cent for Apple and 51 per cent for Samsung and the other Android-based phones. And it’s not tech-related. It was the stubborn refusal of BlackBerry to change.

BlackBerry invented the smartphone, a dangerous spur to pride, for good reason one of the seven deadly sins. Pride kept BB from reinventing the smartphone for the Internet, cutting its prohibitive price, increasing its functionality.

And about a decade ago, BB’s two co-founders and co-CEOs began to preoccupy themselves with no fewer than three failed attempts to buy and relocate a U.S. NHL franchise to Hamilton, Ont. The also delved into admirable but distracting philanthropic activities of the sort that John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie commenced only after retiring from their businesses.

That was fatal in the volatile tech world. Then again, it was also near-fatal to a Gap Inc. and a Starbucks Corp. that also lost touch with their customers in slower-paced fields.

In a favour to Lego A/S, seven-year-old Charlotte Benjamin, in a January letter to the Danish firm that has also gone viral, has put Lego on notice that after visiting a Lego display, she wants more realistic Lego girls, who don’t merely “shop” but, like the boy figures, “went on adventures, worked, saved people, and even swam with sharks.”

In all walks of life, it’s not often enough that we take stock and consider improvements. Call it blissed-out California, or Jobs’ spiritualism, but it struck me as telling, in the best way, that Jobs uses the first words of his memo to ask, “Who are we?”

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